Games Without Frontiers

Outlander

The use of themes developed by the psychologist (see Psychology) Carl Gustav Jung (1875-1961) in Hollywood-produced screenplays is well-established, dominating both North American university courses and many of the popular film franchises since Star Wars: Episode IV – A New Hope (1977), wherein the free-flowing efficacy of an approach based in part on the Jungian archetypes enumerated in The Hero with a Thousand Faces by Joseph Campbell (1949) proved itself by box-office success and cultural impact. Outlander is by no means the only film to include something of all seven of the plots in Christopher Booker’s Jungian storytelling treatise The Seven Basic Plots: Why We Tell Stories (2004), which are: Overcoming the Monster, Rags to Riches, The Quest, Voyage and Return, Comedy, Tragedy and Rebirth. Jung’s own formulation of the shamanic journey toward individuation in Psychology and Religion: West and East (coll, trans 1958; rev 1970) identifies the stages of sacrificial dismemberment, death and rebirth common to so many religious traditions, and which underpin the story arcs of so much of Cinema: sickness is followed by torture is followed by death is followed by rebirth, a narrative trajectory expressed in Outlander as crashing, wounding, capture and the hunt.